Their relative fewness means that the apex predators carry a lot of weight, so to speak, in the workings of an ecosystem. Everywhere in the world, though, those apex predators have been supplanted by a single creature, Homo sapiens, and everywhere the world’s ecosystems are feeling the radical effects of this onset of what other scientists have come to call the Anthropocene: that time in which humans behave on the earth as if a geological force—or, worse, an extinction-causing asteroid.

A Pest Gains Recognition as an Essential Predator by Gregory McNamee For a long time, archaeologists and paleontologists supposed that the dingo, thought to be a kind of wild dog, crossed into Australia from Asia by way of a land bridge that, in the frozen days of 35,000 years past, […]

by Gregory McNamee Congress is about ready to resume its session, and since it appears to be doing nothing about decaying infrastructure, economic catastrophe, joblessness, the collapsing social safety net, or anything else, it might seem quixotic to expect its majority to do anything about the natural world that underlies […]

by Gregory McNamee Under normal circumstances, cows do not eat meat—not unless meat is mixed into their fodder, a practice whose fruit we have seen in various outbreaks of mind-killing disease. Indeed, the effects of bovine spongiform encephalopathy seem as if they could come from some science-fiction movie, just as, […]